Posts By: Dr. Chad Andrews

In medicine, innovative treatments don’t emerge out of thin air; they are the result of a series of advancements in our understanding of how genes, molecules, and cells interact. The human eye is no stranger to this rule. In fact, there is still much we don’t understand about the genetic and cellular foundations of sight….

The Foundation Fighting Blindness is thrilled to announce details for next year’s National Young Leaders Summit. The event will take place in Toronto on the evening of Friday, March 9 and during the day on Saturday, March 10, 2018. We are partnering with the Canadian National Institute for the Blind to hold the Summit at their Community Hub at…

Stem cell therapy has emerged as one of the most promising approaches in the fight to end blindness, and Dr. Gilbert Bernier’s research has played an enormous role in pushing the field forward. By developing new techniques to turn induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) into sheets of cone photoreceptors, Dr. Bernier and his team are…

With support from the FFB community, Dr. Michel Cayouette’s research is advancing the field of stem cell therapy in extraordinary ways; it is doing so by illuminating how stem cells are produced, how they turn into other cells, and the role they play in the overall biology of the human eye. Dr. Cayouette’s ultimate goal?…

It’s been an incredible year for Vision Quest, the FFB’s premier educational series, with events already held in Vancouver, Sudbury, Timmins, St. John’s, and Toronto. The most recent session, an AMD-focused Lunch & Learn at the Toronto Reference Library, featured the world-renowned vitreoretinal surgeon Dr. Netan Choudhry. His talk was both illuminating and expansive, encompassing…

Artificial intelligence is in the news more frequently than ever, but it’s not typically associated with vision research. That may not be the case for long: incredible progress is being made in the application of artificial intelligence (AI) to the detection and prognosis of eye diseases such as age-related macular degeneration (AMD) and diabetic retinopathy….

If you’ve been paying attention to developments in gene science over the last several years, you’ve undoubtedly come across the strange-sounding acronym “CRISPR” (pronounced cris-per). It may sound like a breakfast cereal, but it’s revolutionizing the way scientists interact with genetic code. The acronym stands for “Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats,” which for the…